1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automated homogenizer for homogenizing a tissue sample collected from a human, animal, or plant, and a storage cooler used by the homogenizer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Genetic testing has spread rapidly in recent years in the field of clinical diagnosis. Genetic tests are test for the clinical purpose of identifying the presence or absence of mutations or karyotypes related to genetic diseases by analyzing nucleic acids and chromosomes. As an example of genetic testing, nucleic acids associated with cancers are amplified and examined to determine whether cancer cells are contained within tissue excised from a living body. This examination process is mainly three processes of preprocessing, nucleic acid amplification, and detection.
The preprocessing is a homogenization process to homogenize tissue. The homogenization process uses a homogenization method employing a so-called blender homogenizing tool, ultrasound homogenizing method, pressure homogenizing method or the like. Among such several types of methods, the method using a blender has a problem, that is, inasmuch as the temperature of the tissue is elevated due to the heat generated by friction between the tissue and the homogenizing tool, or heat generated within the homogenizing tool occurs in the blender operation. There is concern that the proteins contained in the tissue will be thermally denatured and prevent accurate measurement when the temperature of the tissue increases. Therefore, it is suggested that the tissue is cooled within a test tube while be homogenized.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2006-320888 discloses a homogenizer configured to cool a pulverizer container that contains a tissue to be pulverized and a pulverizing medium. This homogenizer houses a homogenizer container intermediated by thermally conductive resin within a cooling container formed in a dual structure, and is configured to cool the homogenizer container by circulating coolant around the cooling container.
The tissue must be cooled from the time the tissue is collected from a living being until the homogenizing process is performed and not only during the homogenizing process in order to avoid elevating the tissue temperature to room temperature so as to suppress thermal denaturation of the tissue and obtain accurate measurements. The homogenizer disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2006-320888 requires that a bowl and ice are prepared beforehand to cool the container prior to the homogenizing process separately from the cooling medium used to cool the container that contains the tissue during the homogenizing process. The operator also must move the specimen from the bowl to the homogenizer when the precooled container is installed in the homogenizer.